I have 2 Raspberry Pi's. the second boots up fine, but the first seems faulty.

It has never booted. I tried it initially with a long HDMI lead to my flat screen Samsung television. Nothing.

Then I tried it with the yellow lead to a small television and the screen just appears dark, no boot. There seem to be 3 lights on the board although it is difficult to tell.

I tried the same 5v power supply, SD card and lead with the same small television and the second Raspberry Pi and it works fine, which seems to prove that all these items are ok. I even just tried swopping just the SD cards. Both cards work fine with the second Pi and were supplied with Debian pre installed. Both Pi's are 512 standard.

The second Pi also works fine with a keyboard and mouse fitted.

I fiddled about and then noticed that by now, I seemed to have damaged the SD card slot of the first Pi. I have subsequently fixed it with the glued credit card and shim trick shown on several sites. This seems fine, but still no boot or screen from the first Pi.

Any ideas? Shame to waste the first Pi which I bought for my daughter.

3 Answers
3

You dont give too much detail of exactly what is going on when you switch the RPi on. The LED lights should be doing something, as stated by Krzysztof Adamski in the comments.

Please go through the following link, this should tell you exactly what's wrong with the RPi. If you've gone through everything on that link and it still does not work. Then the RPi itself is faulty and can be returned for another one.

When my pi boots the red(power) led turns on, and the the green led flickers to show it is booting. If only the red turns on, your NOOBS image is probably bad. If the green does flicker, put your sd card in a another computer and check the config file. Make sure HDMI isn't disabled. Hope this helps.

I have Raspberry PI B+. If you are seeing no output on the screen (or it may be blanking out occassionally) you may want to:

Load your sd card on a computer and pull up your boot files.

Go to the config.txt file and setting "config_hdmi_boost=4". Do this by uncommenting the line by removing the hash (#) in front.

I had an issue where the monitor was blanking, or occassionally blinking blank. The issue appeared to be that it wasn't getting enough power from Raspberry PI to the monitor. That configuration change alone fixed the problem.